When RJ sticks to the bounce aesthetic and Acey keeps his writing lucid and/or topical, the record becomes the most listenable of the emcee's recent output.

An interesting, good album: more inventive, heavy, meaningful, and memorable than the Veils’ first.

Like Trans Am’s late-90s material, this album is enjoyable without being astonishing.

A long, exhausting listen, Strawberry Jam will occasionally satiate fans hungry for the band’s strange brilliance.

This is probably the least fun of all his albums, but also among his most rewarding.

It certainly doesn’t stand up to Dig Your Own Hole or half of Exit Planet Dust, but Push the Button is much better than I’d hoped it would be a few months ago.

The Wedding has some slow tracks, but they’re greatly outnumbered by winners that leap over a baffling range of musical styles.

All Years Leaving collects plenty of derivative (but enjoyable) music with a few bright moments of originality.

Just about everything on Sky Blue Sky, even soft-shoe skiffles like the title track, will likely sound better live.

The difference... between For the Season and Gris Gris’s debut album is that the detours are less frequent and less distracting.

Easy Tiger sounds like the kind of album Adams could churn out every 18 months for the rest of his life.

The pared-down moments of The Con seem to long for the clusterfuckedness of the album’s meatier tracks, and for the most part, rightly so.

Nashville is chock full of weeping slide guitar work, soaring harmonies, keyboards, and Rouse’s lonely breath of a voice pushing out from the relatively lush production.

Carter’s an artist clearly capable of making a great album. The Story of My Life isn’t it, but it’s a start.

An album of many highlights but not much visceral or emotional impact.

Contemplative and comforting, this is inoffensive Americana for the brainy set.

As mechanised as their rhythmic focus can be, there is flesh, bone, and brain beneath the near industrial barrage of beats.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms.... Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer.

Where Chesnutt has long been thought of as the banjo-on-his-knee godfather of freak-folk, this record shows his skewed vision is beginning to radiate far from its nearly-naked, southern gothic roots.

Expecting two brilliant albums in a row is a lot, but when flashes of This Delicate Thing We’ve Made indicate he’s more than up to delivering, you get disappointed when there’s so much well-intentioned but patience-shredding filler between the gems.

While most of the tracks on The Shining lack the abstract ideas and flow of Donuts, it’s still an admirable record.

First Impressions of Earth is the first pretty good album of the year.

Voxtrot remains a compelling enough statement to justify the inordinate amounts of excitement thrown around the band, yet nowhere near a fulfillment of the enormous potential they’ve shown.

It is an energetic, powerful, and enjoyable album where occasionally pretty invention is marred by the suspicion that a hit-making producer is on deck.

The group synthesizes pretty much anything you could lump under a general Americana label--bluegrass, country, alt-country, folk rock--to create an idiosyncratic sound more West Coast than Nashville.

If he cut the middle out and made it an EP, Kenny Chesney’s Be As You Are would be a classic.

Like everything this band's made, it's long, sloppy, and uneven, but at this point that's the idea: here are a bunch of people who kind of know each other sitting down with some guitars.

The boys deliver the same sort of agreeable Britpop they've made their name on, wisely realizing that ambition's really not for everyone.